The Human Side of the Residency Shortage/

A Personal Story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO0QvLjLy8I

Today I am going to share with you the “human” side of the Residency shortage.  It is the story of my husband’s personal journey to becoming a doctor.

I met my husband almost 50 years ago at the University of Illinois, Champaign.  When we first began to date my “husband” told me that he planned to go to medical school and would be studying very hard.  So I had been “warned”…He needed to get “A”s in his classes in order to get into medical school.  After we had been dating for awhile, I would sometimes try to “find” him between college classes to hang out.  I knew some of his favorite libraries to study, and I would try to seek him out.  Once he knew that I might look for him, he varied his study locations so he would not get tempted to quit studying if I found him.  He was truly the most dedicated student I had ever met!  I remember that during Spring final exams one semester, he studied so hard for his physics final that he scratched the corneas of his eyes.  His hard contact lenses did not move around enough to  get lubricated while he was studying.  So he was given a doctor’s note to skip the exam and told not to study any further.  During the summers he would work on his vocabulary in preparation for the MCAT exam.  He never stopped working toward the goal of acceptance into medical school.

 But, I really remember the day he received his acceptance into medical school.  It was his 21^st birthday.  His parents had called me from Chicago saying they had received his letter from the U of I Medical School and wanted to bring it to Champaign to see him open it.  They asked me not to say anything so it would be a surprise.  I held a little party at my college apartment and his parents were hiding in the bedroom.  Once the festivities began, they came out to the living room and presented their son with the letter.  We all watched him open it, and then I saw tears streaming down his cheeks….That was a momentous day in all of our lives!  It also meant another 4 years of exceedingly hard work, aiming toward the next goal, getting into a good residency program.

I would say that in the nearly 50 years my husband and I have known each other, Medicine has been at the epicenter of our lives.  It has dictated where we have lived, when, where, and how long we take vacations, etc.  My husband has always loved the Tradition of Medicine, it has a very rigid and rich protocol.  He loved the field of Medical Education and always wanted to become the director of a Residency Program, which he did.

My husband ended up taking 2 residencies and a fellowship:  Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and a Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship.  That amounted to 8 years of training added to 8 years of college and medical school.

But why did I tell you this story?  I wanted you to know how traumatizing this Residency Shortage is on people just like my husband.  Just think of the devastation a fully qualified doctor graduate is feeling the day he/she finds out they did not match into a residency!  All that hard work and dedication, leading up to the last required step toward becoming a licensed physician, would have been for naught!

If you have listened to my prior blogs, you understand there is a good chance the unmatched doctors will never match into a residency in lieu of the current situation.  The extreme number of applications in today’s “Match” will favor the “cream of the crop” which has risen to the “top” numerically.  I cannot imagine the depths of despair these unmatched doctors are feeling.  I can NOT, I CAN not, I CAN NOT!

www.NoMatchMDs.BlogSpot.com